One Day SEO Plan

One Day SEO Plan

Today is Feb 29th, the” extra” in the leap year calendar and a great day to spend on getting your Search Engine Optimization project started. Many business owners and managers shy away from SEO because they just don’t have the time to get it done in house. Too many other priorities. This is unfortunate because SEO can be one of the highest ROI and easiest to measure marketing activities you perform. This extra day this year is a great day to get started.

I call SEO a marketing activity as it really does fit well with the traditional explanation of marketing, which is getting your message in front of potential customers and providing them information to help make a purchase decision. Your website is your information package and SEO is the tool that helps more potential customers find your website when they are searching for a product or service you offer. Few other activities are as measurable as SEO. All you need to do is follow your website analytics stats, review the keyword reports, and you will know if your SEO efforts, which are focused around keywords and search phrases, are increasing in traffic or decreasing.

So this is your extra day of Marketing for 2012. Make it your SEO kick start day and get started the right way, with keyword research. Begin with your website analytics package (we always recommend Google Analytics) and see which keywords currently bring the most traffic to your site. Also view the content reports for which pages are viewed most often. This will tell you what is working for you now. Next, prepare a list of these keywords and test them in Google to see where you rank. Then, prepare a list of words and phrases that your customers would use to search for products and services in your line of business. Search for these in Google and record your position. If you are not on the first page of a search engine, you are not being seen by most searchers. Stats show that most searchers do not go past the first page of results, over 90% only click the listings on page one. If you find yourself on page 2 or higher, these become goals to improve your ranking.

Take your list of keywords and search phrases and use a keyword tool such as the Google AdWords External Keyword Tool (just search for that term). The tool is free to use and will give you a good sense of search volumes and competition for keywords. Enter your whole list into the tool. From the results, prioritize a list of keywords with high search volume and low to medium competition. These will be the keywords you tackle first to drive some early SEO gains.

It is important to note that SEO is not a one day in four years project. SEO should be a continual effort to monitor, research, test and enhance your website. At the end of your One Day SEO project kick start, put together a schedule of these activities to be done on a monthly basis. Schedule your activities on a specific set of keywords. Schedule time each month and commit the time in your calendar. Make sure that meetings and other projects do not supersede your high ROI SEO efforts so that you can take full advantage of the internet as the top lead generation tool available to marketers today.